Fresh Hell

The best dispatches from our grim new reality

Jason Arias

w o r d

f a c t o r y

The Grand Botanical Hotel

While summer may be sailing toward a bitter death on the rocks of Pumpkin Spice Latte Season, it’s never too early to begin preparing for next year’s exotic sojourn, so here’s hoping the world’s first five-star, all-inclusive hotel for plants sticks around for another season to hydrate and spiritually nurture the houseplants of London’s elite.

A Fistful of Fascists

In breathless anticipation of fulfilling its wet dreams of inflicting untold violence on the populace, the homegrown fascists of ICE are building an “urban warfare” training facility with “hyper-realistic” simulations of Arizona and Chicago neighborhoods in Georgia—with an eye for minute detail, no less, down to the “the number of dishes left on the table, toys in the yard, lighting, furniture, etc.” that agents can expect to encounter when they commence the wanton disruption and destruction of human life—which we only learned about after the agency failed to properly redact a document.

Send in The Clowns

Over in New Zealand, one adman hired the finest emotional support money to be his guest at a redundancy meeting that would decide his fate: a clown. Reports indicate the clown produced several balloon animals throughout the meeting and, at one point, mimed crying.

In a nod to Monopoly’s origins as an anticapitalist, landlord-disparaging board game invented by a woman, Hasbro has unveiled Ms. Monopoly: a feminist take on the classic game that champions the God-given right of women to relish in go-getter greed too. Described as the “first-ever game where women make more than men,” Ms. Monopoly also celebrates the invaluable inventions of women, including bulletproof vests, solar heating and ladies’ modern shapewear, and chocolate chip cookies.

Eat Pray Insta

With the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and that whole war in Yemen thing still muddying up their otherwise pristine image as home to $34 trillion of natural resources, the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia is turning to that intrepid breed of image burnisher: the Instagram influencer, inviting them on all-expenses paid tours of the kingdom so they can snap some VSCO-filtered #wanderlust pics in the Arabian Desert.